At the start of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams described the Earth as “an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea”.
Four decades later and ape-descended life forms have come a long way in the field of portable digital devices, although, no less remarkably, the pre-digital method for displaying time also survives. But not for long, according to some newspaper reports. The anxiety has been provoked by remarks made by a teachers’ union leader noting that analogue wall clocks are being replaced in schools because teenagers find them onerous to read.
Telling the time by a pattern of hands on a dial is part of the primary school curriculum. And rightly so, because of the computational gymnastics involved. Reading an analogue clock is a cognitive workout, requiring attribution of different values to the same 12 symbols, interpreted on three parallel planes – seconds, minutes, hours. Only with practice does this awesome mental feat come to feel easy.
But the persistence of analogue timekeeping has another more subtle function. It is as a bridge to ancient systems for organising the world. The ticking hands express a behind-the-scenes mechanism based on physical laws harnessed to precision. The circular face recalls the sundial, the pre-modern parcelling of the Earth’s rotation into even portions.
These narrative connections are especially important when so much of our activity is migrating into a digital realm. That journey is thrilling when it works but terrifying when it fails.
This week many TSB customers were locked out of their bank accounts due to the botched introduction of a new IT system. The virtual location of the crisis, exposing the abstract quality of digitised money, compounded people’s feelings of helplessness. The same anxiety attends concerns about huge government IT projects – the administration of universal credit, for example, and NHS systems – on which millions of lives and livelihoods depend.
Last week it was revealed that the Home Office had destroyed landing cards that proved the entitlement of Windrush-generation migrants to be in Britain. Ministers had not grasped the value buried in those old clerical records.
None of this proves that the past must be archived in hard copy for ever or that people should store banknotes under the mattress. The present is digital and the future will be more so, mostly to humankind’s immense benefit. But to safely navigate where we are going we must remember also where we have come from. That is the symbolic potency of the clock face, marking time’s restless onward march but also its constant cycles. There are other ways to know what the time is at any fixed moment, but none is quite so good for watching how time passes.